It is not surprising that this rarely performed 19th-century Russian classic is better known from Mussorgsky’s opera than from Pushkin’s original play.

The force of its reputedly magnificent poetry is necessarily lost while, for all its conscious echoes of Shakespeare’s histories, this epic tale of power politics in 17th-century Russia has a grand, static quality short on the shades of light and dark characteristic of its model.

Not that Michael Boyd’s direction of Adrian Mitchell‘s adaptation lacks energy and even an element of slapstick comedy. The two-hour, straight-through production never flags and, despite its dependence on declamatory rhetoric rather than theatrical action, holds the audience’s attention throughout.

Two-thirds of the way through Tom Piper’s designs change from traditional to modern costume, although we need no reminder of Putin to recognise the play’s modern affinities with Boris Godunov’s calculated and ruthless rise to the tsardom. In the process, Richard III-like, he has the legitimate young heir murdered. Depending on Machiavellian courtiers and a servile and fickle serfdom, he is never free from the insecurities founded on guilt.

After a deathbed lesson to his young son on how to hold and handle power, closely modelled on that of Henry IV to Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s play, he dies leaving an open field for the new pretender who, of course, has the young tsar murdered.

Oddly Lloyd Hutchinson’s Godunov has little to do but reveal his inner angst. Gethin Anthony’s lightweight pretender is far more interesting, especially in a comically shaped key scene when, stricken with idealistic romantic fervour, he reveals his humble origins to Lucy Briggs-Owen’s Polish princess. She is horrified, having opportunistically seen herself as a a potential tsarina.

A fitting final production for Michael Boyd as artistic director of the RSC.

A WDC team found Minke whale steaks and blubber openly available to buy at a tourist shop in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, thus putting Denmark in breach of European Union (EU) laws which ban EU Member States from the killing and commercial sale of whales. Ironically, the revelations by WDC also come in the week when Greenland has threatened to impose its own quotas regarding the number of whales that it will hunt for ‘local nutritional needs’ in 2013.

Earlier in the year, a separate undercover investigation by WDC revealed that Greenland (a Danish overseas territory) had been actively undermining the IWC ban on commercial whaling by selling whale meat to tourists visiting Greenland from whales that are allowed to be killed only for the nutritional needs of local aboriginal people.

This latest undercover operation by WDC in Denmark itself clearly shows that this form of illegal commercial whaling has now extended into mainland Europe and makes a mockery of Greenland’s requests to hunt more whales to feed native Greenlanders.

“Denmark is an EU member and so is bound by EU law”, says WDC chief executive, Chris Butler-Stroud. “Yet individuals from WDC posing as tourists visiting Copenhagen were able to make two independent purchases of both whale steaks and blubber. When notified that the individuals concerned were not resident in Denmark, the sales staff didn’t seem to care.

Commercial whaling – Not subsistence

“This is clearly commercial whaling. IWC rules state that the taking of whales is permitted only when the meat and products are to be used exclusively for local consumption. Our investigation report shows that this demand for more whale meat is driven by the commercial consumer market not by aboriginal needs.”

WDC has now presented the findings of its latest undercover investigation in a full briefing report sent to the EU Commission and also to the IWC and CITES relevant international authorities.

WDC is also requesting:

That the EU should immediately re-examine the legitimacy of allowing the export of whale products into the EU
All exports should cease immediately until the IWC has granted an ASW quota to Greenland.
The EU should require Denmark to put in place all such measures to ensure that whale meat and products cannot be moved around within the EU outside of Denmark.
The IWC should not allocate any quotas to Greenland unless satisfied that the EU has complied with the above recommendations.

Jacintha Saldanha’s death is a tragedy for her partner, her children, her wider family and friends, but it should also give our society a jolt of reality.

This nurse has apparently taken her own life in response to a puerile stunt by two Australian broadcasters who impersonated the Queen, asking for details of the condition of her [grand]daughter-in-law in hospital.

Had the private hospital in which she worked had a telephone receptionist on duty, Saldanha would not have found herself in the public eye.

However, the main reason for her plight is the hysterical overreaction by our media and politicians to every detail of the royal family soap opera that mocks Britain’s claim to be a modern democracy.

Pregnant woman has morning sickness is not a headline that would find its way into any newspaper, radio or TV news bulletin, but when it concerns the situation of the putative mother of a future head of state, it emphasises that women who join the Windsor outfit are seen essentially as brood mares to extend the dynasty.

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Her brief stay in hospital became the green light for news reporters to set up camp outside in a pretence that something newsworthy was afoot.

BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell was given licence to expound at length and in ignorance on the woman’s condition, even speculating that the expression on her husband’s face might indicate an improvement.

The media insists that it is giving the public what it wants, but it is arguable that its highly strung blanket coverage works to foster demand.

Royals complain constantly about breaches of their privacy but their assiduous courting of the media to cover one non-event after another suggests a symbiotic relationship.

David Cameron’s deputy Nick Clegg, the great moderniser, made much last week of a new rule permitting the first-born child of the Queen’s eldest grandson to accede to the monarchy, irrespective of gender.

This was a great step forward for equality, he said, because the former rule was “old-fashioned.”

Not that such a description could be applied, of course, to the ongoing practice of hereditary succession for head of state in the 21st century when the vast majority of the world’s population have moved beyond such anachronistic practices.

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Even states elsewhere in Europe that retain so-called constitutional monarchies seem able to live their daily lives without politicians being unable to debate serious issues in the absence of registering forelock-tugging sympathies to whichever royal is out of sorts.

The death of Jacintha Saldanha ought to have given the authorities in Britain pause for thought over their responsibility for this calamity.

But the Metropolitan Police have wasted no time in making contact with Australia, indicating that they wish to speak to people on the radio station. Why?

British police have no jurisdiction in Australia and the only legal issue is whether the reporters violated a local law banning broadcast of material acquired by a listening device.

Nothing that police do will bring Saldanha back to her grieving family. Nor is it fair to conclude that it was the actions of the two reporters that drove her to take her own life.

The fault lies with the hysteria generated by politicians and media for their own reasons about a bizarre institution that ought to be superseded without delay by a democratic republic.

The seabird population on the tropical UK Overseas Territory, previously numbering into the tens of millions, was devastated by the cats which were introduced onto the island in the early 19th Century to control introduced rats and mice. The RSPB began a project to remove feral cats on Ascension Island in 2002. The project was supported by funding from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the island was formally declared feral cat free in 2006.

Globally threatened

The Ascension frigatebird is a globally threatened species found nowhere else in the world. It is one of the 33 Globally Threatened British Birds found in the UK’s Overseas Territories, and is considered Vulnerable to Extinction by the IUCN.

Dr Tim Stowe, the RSPB’s International Director, said: “This is the news we have been waiting for since starting the project more than a decade ago. Many species on the UK Overseas Territories are threatened by non-native species and this project marks a landmark in conservation. Ascension is the largest, inhabited island where feral cat removal has been attempted and proved successful. What a wonderful Christmas present.”

The discovery was made by members of the Army Ornithological Society, together with members of the Ascension Island Government’s Conservation Department.

Ascension frigatebirds are sometimes called Man O’War birds or Pirate birds because they steal other birds’ food in flight. They are almost as big as albatrosses, and although seabirds, they can’t swim.

The adult male Ascension frigatebird is black overall, with a glossy green and purple sheen, but during courtship it develops a bright red gular (a flap of skin) that inflates to form an impressive heart-shaped balloon. The adult female is more rusty-brown, particularly around the collar and breast, and some individuals have patches of white on the breast and abdomen.

Ascension Island birds

Ascension Island is a small, remote, volcanic island in the South Atlantic. It is rich in unique flora and fauna. At the time of its colonisation by Europeans in 1815, it was thought to host 20 million individual seabirds, including the Ascension Frigatebird

Derren Fox from Ascension Island Conservation, said: “We were out with the Army Ornithological Society to work on some other seabirds in the area when Andrew Bray from AOS came up to us with a photograph of the bird on a nest. We were all incredibly excited and went to see the site and survey for further nests in the area. It’s a great moment for Ascension conservation and a superb example of collaborative work between the FCO, RSPB and Ascension Island Conservation.”

Feral cat eradication

A Foreign and Commonwealth spokesperson, said: “We are delighted at the news that, after almost 180 years, the frigatebirds have returned to Ascension to breed again. The feral cat eradication project has been a real success and we are grateful to the RSPB for their skilful management of the initiative. This is great example of the practical impact of the UK’s wider commitment to working with the Territories and environmental partners to protect the bio-diversity of crucial habitats. The UK underlined that commitment with the recent launch of ‘Darwin Plus’, a £2m fund to support environmental work across the Territories. We very much hope to see more innovative projects take advantage of this and help further safeguard the extraordinary biodiversity of our Territories.”

Funding for RSPB’s work on Ascension has come from the FCO, Defra’s Darwin fund, and the European Union.

A team of scientists has launched a satellite tracking program that monitors rare Ascension frigatebirds in an effort to better understand where the species goes when foraging at sea. The tracking data collected by the research project can be viewed at seaturtle.org. The project is set to run for two years and is funded by the Darwin Initiative, University of Exeter and Ascension Island Government Conservation Department: here.

Campaigners fighting to protect a Yorkshire moor said on Friday that they are taking their case to the European Commission.

The Ban the Burn campaign says public subsidies are being paid to the owner of moorland who burns the land to cater for grouse breeding and shooting.

The campaigners say burning of “blanket bog” and sphagnum moss to cater for grouse worsens the flooding problems faced in the Yorkshire Pennines, in addition to destroying wildlife habitats which are supposed to be protected.

The campaign is based in West Yorkshire‘s Hebden Bridge, just south of privately owned Walshaw Moor.

Government-backed Natural England has entered a “Higher Level Stewardship” agreement with the moor’s owner involving subsidies of £2.5 million. Meanwhile the owner is allowed to continue burning the moor.

The campaigners are challenging the legality of the agreement on the basis that European funding for nature protection should not be used to subsidise activities likely to degrade a legally protected habitat.

Hebden Bridge resident Dongria Kondh said: “It can’t be right for a millionaire grouse-moor owner to be receiving nearly £1,000 of public money every working day for the next 10 years without any detectable public benefit.”

The town was hit by severe flooding this June and July.

“In order to minimise our flood risk we need the upland catchment to be managed so that large areas of degraded blanket bog are restored to a healthy state, with a good cover of sphagnum moss to act as a buffer slowing the run-off during heavy rainfall events,” Ms Kondh said.

“By allowing continued burning Natural England have let us down very badly.”

The case gained prominence when photos revealed that a member of the Wildlife Services, Jamie Ohlson, posted images of a coyote that was caught in a leg trap being attacked and killed by his dogs. Ohlson also posted images of himself posing with the tattered remains of the coyote. Aside from the abuse and suffering heaped on the poor coyote, to boast of this cruelty via social networking implies that Mr Ohlson is really not the right person to be doing this work.

Ohlson is not alone though. In a very similar case the Washington Post revealed that a U.S. Forest Service Employee Josh Bransford posed with a wolf that he had just shot. The wolf in question was actually caught in a leg trap, and Bransford shot the immobilized wolf before posing with the dead animal with a big grin on his face. Why why why would anyone do that?

‘Wildlife Services’ have featured in Wildlife Extra before. They cull more than 1 million animals every year, often from the air, and spend millions on aerial gunning and ‘wildlife control’. At least 10 staff have been killed in air crashes, and dozens more badly injured.

Jamie Ohlson and some of the photos he posted of his dogs and the trapped coyote – Photos courtesy of Wild Earth Guardians

US Forest Service employee Josh Bransford and some of the images he posted – Courtesy of Wild Earth Guardians

Wildlife Services-a barbaric, wasteful and misnamed agency within the US Department of Agriculture, has been having their way for almost a century, our government’s secret war on wildlife has been killing millions of native predators and birds as well as maiming, poisoning, and brutalizing countless non-targeted and endangered species, along with quite a few pets and seriously injuring people: here.

Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) has used its acceptance speech for a prestigious peace prize to condemn the British government’s hypocrisy over its arms deals with despotic regimes.

The charity, one of the recipients of this year’s Right Livelihood Awards – known as the alternative Nobel prize – made the criticism at a ceremony in the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm on Friday.

Accepting the award on behalf of the group, CAAT outreach co-ordinator Anne-Marie O’Reilly said: “The trail of destruction wrought by weapons produced in the UK extends beyond the wars waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. It reaches from Gaza to Sri Lanka, from Egypt to East Timor.

“The UK spent four years promoting weapons to Gaddafi’s regime in Libya. Then in 2011, it bombed the tanks that just weeks before it had been preparing to upgrade.

“That visit shows us that our governments are not just allowing the sales, but actively promoting them,” she said.

Labour MP for Islington North Jeremy Corbyn also accused the PM of blatant hypocrisy.

“There is no point in complaining about human rights abuses and the guns of state authorities if we supply the guns, arms and the riot equipment in the first place,” he said.

“The Prime Minister’s odyssey around the Gulf States, on one hand raising human rights issues, at the same time being in the company of a whole phalanx of arms suppliers/dealers – this is a completely unacceptable way of doing business.

“I’m proud to represent the constituency with the offices of such brilliant organisations as the Campaign Against the Arms Trade which have exposed this state of affairs for many years and I welcome their work and support.”